


We're All Human

by SierraBravo



Category: Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: (sort of?), (while human-ish anyway), F/M, Female-Presenting Crowley (Good Omens), M/M, Trans Crowley (Good Omens), angelic and infernal sabotage, convenient memory loss
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-12-31
Updated: 2020-06-14
Packaged: 2021-02-22 15:48:04
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 10
Words: 20,771
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22051570
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SierraBravo/pseuds/SierraBravo
Summary: Crowley & Aziraphale lose their memories and think they really are Nanny Ashtoreth and Brother Francis, and, no longer having the excuse of being hereditary enemies, fall rather deeply for each other.
Relationships: Aziraphale/Crowley (Good Omens), Nanny Ashtoreth/Brother Francis (Good Omens)
Comments: 85
Kudos: 130





	1. It begins, as it ends, in a garden

It was a warm, sunny afternoon at the Dowling estate. The flowers bloomed cheerfully, thanks mostly to a certain demon, and the young Warlock was hard at work attempting to train the cat that seemed to live in the gardener’s cottage to do his evil bidding. It was not, so far, going well.

“Attack!” the five year old commanded.

The cat lifted its leg high in the air and began to clean itself whilst maintaining eye contact with the child.

“Bad kitty,” Warlock told it.

The cat seemed not to care.

A little ways beyond, behind enough flowers and bushes as to not be obviously watching the child, were an angel and a demon. They were, currently, in disguise, as they had been for years, now. Still, were one given knowledge of what their true natures were, it would perhaps not have been too difficult to tell which was which.

Crowley slouched. It was a difficult task in her tightly fitted below the knee pencil skirt, but she tried as best she could not to let that stop her. Her disguise was quite a prim and proper lady, and so these moments out of character, as it were, felt like relief. She regretted, however, the lack of fluid movement allowed by her costume. She tried to lean back, elbows slipping over the back of the bench, but the seams of her jacket protested, and she folded them instead, frowning in annoyance.

“Don’t see what’s so difficult about this, anyway,” Crowley said, poking Aziraphale’s side with a sharp and darkly painted nail.

“It’s only flowers. Water, sun, fertilizer, and good speaking to, that’s all they need. And still you have to come get me to clean up your messes. Can’t believe you killed the lilies again. And just in time for Ms. Dowling’s birthday, too, you know they’re her favourites.”

“Well!” exclaimed Aziraphale, “Well! It’s not my fault! There were, oh, what do you call them? The little insects. How was I to know?”

“Excuses, excuses,” Crowley said, though her lipsticked smile betrayed more fondness than mocking.

The sun glinted of her tiny sunglasses as she turned her face to Aziraphale, who looked, she thought, just the right amount of upset, his pouting hindered only slightly by the ridiculous fake teeth of his disguise. 

“Oh, relax, I’ll tell them how to grow right,” Crowley promised, because enjoyable as it was to poke fun at the angel, seeing that beaming smile that held nearly the brightness of his halo made her feel warm in a way that had nothing to do with the summer heat.

But that was a feeling for another time. They had work. They had bosses. Bosses who, these last few years since the birth and delivery of young Warlock, had been watching them more closely than usual, and so it wouldn’t do to act too friendly.

Behind some further bushes, just far enough away to be out of earshot, someone was lurking. It was hard to lurk properly in broad daylight, but they did their very best, their infernal essences seeping out to darken everything in their immediate vicinity just a touch. They had orders. They had plans.

In the grass there was a rough circle scratched into the grass, stained with mud and twigs. Surrounding it were several very poorly drawn symbols that, regardless of their details, still were quite ominous. They did the exact opposite of glowing. They shadowed. They darkened, like black holes in the Earth.

The demon mumbled words in an unknowable tongue, words that sounded like growls, like the screams of the damned, like the echoing, ringing silence of outer space. The ritual was under way. There were a series of shaky gestures, not strictly required for the ritual, but which added a little flair, a little drama, as a sphere of pure darkness rose from the centre of the circle. The demon continued to mutter unholy incantations, as they gestured towards the target. The dark orb hovered for a moment, then shot of towards the angel.

“Ow,” came a shout from the angel.

“Fuck,” exclaimed the demon next to him.

There was silence. The lurking demon frowned, and pulled a scroll from somewhere in their dirty coat. Memory loss ritual? Check. Get the angel? Check. Get the demon also was not, as far as the demon could see, on the list. Ah, thought the lurking demon, fuck.

The idea was, as far as the lurking demon had gathered, to make the angel think he was human, so as to minimise his impact on the Antichrist, leaving the demon Crowley to do their infernal work in peace, ensuring smooth sailing into the end of the world. If, as the lurking demon now was starting to suspect, they had accidentally sabotaged Crowley also, that was bad. That was very bad.

In the sunlight proper, Ashtoreth blinked in confusion, adjusted her glasses and righted herself, sitting up properly.

“What was that?” she asked Brother Francis, leaning so she could see her young ward, checking that he was all right.

The boy seemed to be attempting to play with the cat, who remained entirely uninterested in anything other than a nap.

“What was what?” Brother Francis replied, looking entirely too care free.

“I thought something… No, no, I suppose it was nothing. I had better go see if they boy needs anything.”


	2. Witches and Warlocks

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Warlock has Thoughts.

Something had happened. Warlock wasn’t sure what, exactly, but it was, very definitely, _something_. Nanny wasn’t behaving right. For one, she hadn’t told him about the demon army he would one day command as he razed the Earth in _days_. She hadn’t sung him the usual lullaby either, but some sweet nonsense. It hadn’t worked as well, though he’d pretended it did. He didn’t, after all, want to hurt his nanny’s feelings.

It, whatever it was, had happened two days ago, he thought. There had been a noise, a bad one, followed by his nanny saying some of the words she told him he was allowed to use, but not so his parents or the gardener heard, not yet. Nanny had been strange after that. More normal, which made him uneasy. She wasn’t supposed to be. He had snuck over to her room to ask her to get him a glass of water in the night, as hers was right by his, and when his knocks got no answer (which was normal, she was a heavy sleeper, she said, whatever that meant), he opened the door. She had been asleep wearing her sunglasses. He knew she kept them on all day because her eyes didn’t like the sun, or so she said, but he had come to her at night before, and she never slept with them. He had snuck quietly back out and foregone his water.

“Ah, there you are Warlock, I think it’s time for your lunch, yes?”

She had appeared in the doorway to his playroom, looking just as she always did, but sounding just slightly wrong. Her voice usually changed more, slipped back a bit on occasion into another accent. It hadn’t in two days, now, just a perfect soft Scottish accent.

“Yes, Nanny,” he said, and put down his toy train, resolving to also abandon his train of thoughts, which was less fun, and had no hellfire motifs painted on by hand.

Whatever was going on, it was best to pretend all was good and normal until he could figure out more.

After his lunch, during which both he and Nanny had been more quiet than normal, he went out into the garden.

“What a splendid idea,” Nanny had said, “fresh air and sun is good for you.”

Which was wrong. Usually she said to be sure not to listen to Brother Francis’ nonsense, to be sure to keep in mind that all the world would be his to rule some day, and that she always had a magnifying glass on hand should he want to set fire to some ants. He never had, because Brother Francis told him that ants were good and kind and only did what was natural to them, and should, like all god’s creatures, be respected and loved. It made him feel guilty just thinking about it. So he resolved to go ask him.

“Brother Francis?” he asked, reaching up to knock on the door to his cottage.

Nanny was, at his request, sitting on a bench a little ways off, reading the morning’s paper. It was the kind of paper his mother read, and not the weird ones with pictures of creepy looking people she normally liked. This too was wrong.

“Oh hello my dear boy!” said Brother Francis, opening the door and beaming down at him, “would you like some tea? I just made a pot.”

“Eww,” said Warlock, “no thank you. It’s just water that tastes wrong.”

“Well, might ye not say that about anything other than water? Milk? Juice?” Brother Francis argued, though his friendly smile stayed put.

Warlock pondered for a minute.

“S’pose. But those taste good, so it’s different.”

He followed the gardener into the cottage, stopping to pet the fat black cat that snoozed in the arm chair. The cottage smelled like tea and biscuits and something else, weirder, probably from the vase of flowers on the coffee table. They didn’t look like any that grew in the garden. He wondered who gave the gardener flowers. Or perhaps they were a hobby. Could you be a professional gardener and have a flower based hobby? Probably. Adults were weird like that.

“Could I tempt you to some hot cocoa?”

Warlock considered.

“Only if I get a biscuit too. One of the good ones, not the dry crumbly ones.”

“You drive a hard bargain, Master Warlock, but we can make it work.”

As Brother Francis busied himself getting things ready, Warlock looked around. The gardener and Nanny had always been connected in his mind, and seemed like friends, so perhaps he knew something of why she had been acting so strange. He sat down on the chair, scooping the fat cat into his lap. It meowed, insulted, but didn’t move other than to shove its head into his palm. He obeyed, scratching behind its ears, as he looked around for clues, which was a concept he’d recently learned about on TV. He didn’t see any.

“Here you are,” the gardener said, setting down a mug of cocoa and a small plate of biscuits (good ones, with jam filling) in front of him.

“Thanks Brother Francis,” he said, and tried to stuff two of the biscuits into his mouth at once, and dropping one onto the cat, who promptly jumped down to the floor to get the jam out of its fur.

“Calm down, lad, they’re not going anywhere,” Brother Francis said, smiling in that way adults did when they thought children were being silly.

“What brings ye down here to my humble cottage, then?” he asked when Warlock had finished the biscuits and started on the cocoa.

“Nanny,” Warlock said.

“Well yes, I imagine so, I saw her through the window, but I meant-“

“No, something’s wrong with her,” Warlock interrupted, “she’s being _weird_.”

“Oh? How so?”

Warlock shrugged, and drank some more cocoa, only slightly burning his tongue. This was also strange, as everything the gardener gave him was usually the perfect temperature. The gardener leaned forward, resting his arms on his knees, which he also never usually did. He usually told Warlock about the importance of good posture.

“She’s too normal,” Warlock said after a while, having failed to formulate something that more fully encapsulated how very wrong everything had felt the last two days.

“You know,” said Brother Francis, “I don’t believe I’ve ever heard anyone accuse her of that before.”

He was still smiling that smile, like what Warlock had said had been _funny_ and _silly_. Warlock frowned.

“She’s not told me that I need to get ready to lay waste to the Earth in _days_ ,” Warlock said, and Brother Francis looked unsettlingly, well, unsettled.

“And that’s something she does, is it? Is that from one of those television programmes you like? Or a game?”

This was very wrong. This wasn’t how Brother Francis was supposed to react at all. He was supposed to say that yes, this did sound very weird, and he’d go and have a talk with her, right now, and figure out what was wrong. He was used to Warlock talking about that normal ways in which Nanny was strange, and usually just told him that he should listen to him instead, and be kind to everyone, and never destroy any part of the earth, with the exception, perhaps, of overly enthusiastic bookshop customers, which Warlock had never understood.

“Uh,” said Warlock, “yeah. She’s forgotten all about it. Can I have another biscuit?”

As Brother Francis went to see if there were any more, Warlock was forced to have the unpleasant realisation that whatever was wrong with Nanny was also wrong with Brother Francis. He’d seen on TV about people being kidnapped by aliens and such, poor copies of themselves, on the programmes he turned on after he was supposed to have gone to bed (Nanny had helped him find good ones, with cool monsters). Maybe that was what was going on here. He had to investigate further. And find a way to get Brother Francis to give him more of these biscuits, because they were extremely good.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So. I do realise this doesn't read like an actual five year old, but I do hope it reads like what a five year old thinks they are like. I think I did say he was five. I forget. Either way, hope someone finds this fun and that the concept hasn't been done too too many times. I've not seen it, but I've also not looked, so as not to be too influenced by anyone else's version, should there be one.


	3. And I Want To Go Home, But I Am Home

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Ashtoreth Jashtoreth Crowley begins to suspect something is amiss.

It was early morning, and she was in her bed, sun streaming in from the large windows. It fell perfectly so as to warm her, but just so it wasn’t in her eyes to induce any undue wakefulness. Ashtoreth J Crowley (for the demon had not been all that creative in creating his cover identity), felt strange. Off. She had for a few days, now, and she couldn’t put her finger on exactly why. It was as though her life up until three or so days ago had been vague, nebulous, more a suggestion than actual events. When she tried to think too far back, to remember, she found that her head started to hurt.

The last five years or so was fine. She had clear and visual memories of spending time with Warlock as an infant, a baby, a toddler, all up till now. She had memories of Warlock’s family, whom she didn’t particularly like, and of the other staff, with whom she was politely acquainted at most. Except the gardener, of course. Brother Francis was her dear friend. Exactly how they had become friends was a little unclear to her; she felt as though she had known him her whole life, but then, some friends were just like that. You met them, and within a week you were as close as with someone you had known since childhood. So those two had been, essentially, her life the last few years. Warlock and Francis. One could, she supposed, do a lot worse.

The real trouble started when she tried to think about what she had been doing before she got this job. She must have been doing something. Quite a lot of somethings. She was, after all- how old was she? It started with a four, she was pretty sure. And ended with a number higher than a four. And she couldn’t, for the life of her, remember exactly. That was worrying. She had the vague idea that she had gone to university, and then dropped out again. That she had done some sort of sex work at some point. There was a vague feeling that she when she was young had been raised Christian, but had later joined the Church of Satan. She knew that she must have transitioned at some point. She knew too, that she had a rare eye disorder, that made her pupils look like slits and be too sensitive to light. She must, she imagined, have been bullied relentlessly for this as a child, yet she had absolutely no memory of it. Perhaps she had worn contact lenses. That was the trouble, really, with all this. She didn’t remember it, not truly. There were no mental pictures, no emotions attached. It was like knowing someone else’s life story, like something she had been told once. It didn’t feel right.

She would have to get up soon, she knew, but there was something so very comfortable about just basking in the sunlight. Perhaps if she absorbed enough of its rays she would gain the energy, as if she were some sort of cold blooded lizard thing, dependent on it. A ridiculous thought, of course. And yet.

Her alarm rang for the third and final time, bringing the sad news that she could remain here no longer. Ashtoreth groaned, for effect, and then got up, smoothing down her nightgown, which had ridden up to her waist, as it always did. It was, ostensibly, sensible and respectable, the kind of night wear an old fashioned nanny would wear. The hem reached halfway down her calves, the neckline was high, and the sleeves were long, but it was made of black silk, with intricate red embroidery around the neck. It even had her initials embroidered across the chest.

Picking up her clothes, she wandered into the small en suite bathroom (for which she profusely thanked whoever had renovated the building, she wasn’t sure she could have dealt with sharing one with other staff members), and showered. She curled and pinned her hair up. Covered the tattoo by her ear with concealer. Put on the rest of her subtle make up. Just softening edges, making it seem she wasn’t all sharp angles. Dressed. Put on her sunglasses. Checked her phone. Five to eight. Perfect. Time to wake Warlock. 

-

It had started to rain while she made the boy breakfast, and so their morning was spent glueing costume feathers to all of Warlock’s dinosaur toys, because he’d seen a documentary about it, and he wanted them to be scientifically accurate. The feathers, she had pointed out, were likely not quite as brightly neon coloured back then, but Warlock did not feel this was important.

“If they had feathers,” he asked, “could they all fly?”

“Oh, I don’t think so. Did not the programme say?”

The boy frowned. Like the dinosaurs, he too was covered in glue and pink and yellow feathers. Ashtoreth had avoided most of this fate, though a few small and downy ones had got stuck on the pins in her hair, and sticky hard bits of glue adhered to her fingertips.

“It didn’t say they couldn’t,” Warlock said eventually.

“Well,” said Ashtoreth, “you know there were flying dinosaurs, yes? We read about them in your book, remember?”

“Yes,” Warlock agreed, “but those were pet- ter- terrorat- not t-rexes.”

“Pterodactyls,” she supplied, “true. I suppose you will have to become a palaeontologist and find out, won’t you?”

“Palalontlis?”

“A dinosaur scientist,” she explained.

Warlock looked at her, wide eyed and frowning.

“What’s wrong?”

“You’re not s’posed to say that,” Warlock told her, an intensity in his voice that seemed out of place in so young a child.

“Oh, why not? Your father insistent on your following in his footsteps? Would you want to be a diplomat?”

The boy certainly could not be any less diplomatic than his father, she thought, with what she liked to think was an appropriate amount of bitterness. She did not like the man.

“You’re s’posed to say I’m gonna rule the Earth when I grow up,” Warlock explained.

She wondered, briefly, what all that was about. She couldn’t remember him demanding that before, but it must be some new game. Children were so very imaginative at this age, and it was best, she thought, to encourage them.

“Yes,” she amended, “of course, you’re right. World domination it is.”

Warlock did not look entirely satisfied, squinting at her with something almost like distrust, but she ignored it, announcing it was time they tidied up a bit, he was going in to London with Mrs. Dowling in just an hour, after all.

-

After Warlock had left, Ashtoreth went back to her room for a little while. One was never quite safe from interaction with the other staff, and that wasn’t something she had the energy for. She got out her mobile, and did some research on memory loss. Nothing seemed to fit. Not only was retrograde amnesia far less common than fiction made it seem, but she had not had any experience that could have induced it either. No head injury or other trauma. Well, not that she could remember, at any rate. And the constellations of symptoms didn’t quite fit. No, it didn’t sound like quite the thing. Perhaps. Perhaps she needed to talk it over with someone. Yes, that was the sensible option.

She fussed with her hair just a little bit more than was necessary before making her way down across the grounds to Brother Francis’ cottage. It lay tucked behind some high foliage, and to the side, so as not to be directly visible from the main house. It would, she supposed, be terrible to be too aware of the help. But then, she could hardly blame Mr. Dowling for that, both the house and cottage had plainly stood for centuries. She blamed him a little anyway. It wasn’t that he was such a terrible person, really. He was awfully American, but she supposed he couldn’t be blamed for that either. It was that he had looked at her Like That during the interview. Like he knew. Like it was something he would file away to use against her, should the opportunity arrive. But Mrs. Dowling had liked her, and she had been hired, and anyway the man was away so often as to be more like the occasional guest than any sort of head of the house.

The cottage itself was quite small, and looked almost ridiculously idyllic, with overflowing flowerbeds outside, and the sort of mess that couldn’t help but be charming. Benches and flower pots and gardening equipment and slightly more wicker baskets than anyone could reasonably need. The windows were small, but seemed always, regardless of weather, to emit a warm and welcoming glow. Ivy wound it’s way in delicate patterns up the walls and around corners. It, much like Francis himself, felt overwhelmingly warm and welcoming and like _home_. She chose not to dwell on why that was, and looked instead over at the small cluster of apple trees just beyond the cottage. A few weeks ago she had tried very hard to convince Warlock to eat an apple from the trees, and Francis had tried equally fervently to dissuade him from it, and they had both found it hysterically funny at the time, though she could not for the life of her remember why. Maybe that was why Warlock had been refusing apple juice for the last month, despite it up until recently being his favourite.

She knocked.

“Oh, my dear girl! Do come in!”

Brother Francis beamed at her, as he always did, smile bright as the sun. She smiled back, though a great deal more subdued. This was their established dynamic, their habit. She followed him in.

“How are you doing? Would you like a cup of tea? Something stronger? It looks rather cold and wet out. Haven’t been out, myself.”

His accent was a bit more toned down than it usually was, and sounded slightly more natural. She wondered why that was. Perhaps he exaggerated it around others to make some sort of point? She couldn’t blame him. With all the Americans around claiming they couldn’t understand regional accent, she sometimes made hers a bit more aggressive too. 

After asking whether he had any coffee instead (he never did but she always asked), she gratefully accepted a hot cup of something herbal and steaming that she strongly suspected had come from the garden. It tasted slightly more like hay than she would, ideally, have preferred, but it was warm and handed to her with a bright smile.

“So what brings you down here, then?”

“Well,” she began, carefully looking down into her tea, willing her sunglasses not to slide down as she watched them become even more dark and foggy, “I wanted to… to talk to you about something, if that was all right.”

“Of course! Always welcome here for that, my dear, always,” Francis assured her, settling himself with his own cup of tea in the chair opposite the sofa, just on the edge of the cushion, as the cat was taking up the innermost half.

“I, oh, thank you,” she said, feeling a hint of warmth in her cheeks.

“Well,” she began, taking another sip of the tea and briefly regretting it, “it’s me. I’ve been- I don’t know. I’m forgetting things. Like everything that has happened to me, my life, it feels as if it’s fading.”

Francis made a sympathetic sort of go-on noise, raising his frankly implausibly bushy eyebrows and smiling encouragingly. Ashtoreth twisted the cup in her hands nervously, and then wondered what exactly she was feeling nervous about. Francis was the most kind and least judgemental person she knew. Though, frankly, with the exception of Warlock it felt, sometimes, like he was the only person she knew.

“I don’t know what it is,” she continued, “but I both do not feel like myself at all, at the same time as I feel more myself than I ever have. As if… As if I’m just an idea of a person. I even found a document on my phone that listed every part of my background- of my life that I can remember before I came to work here!”

She fished her phone out of her pocket to show him, scrolling down the list because however lovely and kind he was she had significant doubts when it came to his technological skills, even when it came to scrolling on a touch screen.

“You know,” Francis said, “young master Warlock did come here recently. Said you were acting, what was it? Too normal. Said it was some game he played with you that you had forgotten. But I could tell the lad was worried about you.”

“Oh,” she said.

Well, that made sense, the way he looked at her. For a five year old it was a well guarded suspicion, but, well, to older eyes it was fairly transparent. 

“Yes, I suppose he is. But I don’t know what to do about it. Last night he asked me to sing the lullaby about the end of the world! I’ve no idea what that means.”

“Well,” Francis said in a soothing voice, “you know how children are.”

“Do I?” she demanded, voice just a bit shrill now.

“I don’t even know if I’ve worked with any other children before! I don’t-”

Brother Francis rose, leaving the cat to meow in victory and stretch out over the full expanse of the armchair, and came round to sit next to her, putting a comforting hand on her knee.

“My dear girl,” he said, “you’re very good with the lad. Best nanny I’ve seen. We’ll get to the bottom of this, I promise.”

Ashtoreth focused on slowing down her breathing. Panicking was not going to help. She needed something to ground her. Francis’s hand on her knee, that was something. His hand was warm, even through the thick fabric of her skirt. Large, fingers more rounded, less angular than hers, softer. His nails looked suspiciously immaculate for someone who was supposed to be doing gardening, but then, she rarely ever saw him doing anything more than half heartedly watering the plants and complimenting them on their colours. 

She noticed, now that she was paying attention, that Francis wasn’t wearing the usual ridiculous smock taken from someone’s idea of a medieval peasant, but was wearing a baggy off white woollen jumper, which was rolled halfway up his arms. A small part of her mind wondered, very briefly, what those arms would feel like around her. No. Not now. This wasn’t helping with her breathing at all.

“That’s it,” he murmured, and she almost jumped, his voice so close to her ear, “don’t worry yourself so much. Perhaps it will pass?”

She took a deep breath.

“Yes,” she agreed, “perhaps it will.”

She turned to him, putting her hand on his.

“Thank you, Francis. For listening, for- well. Everything.”

Then, quite without her conscious mind interfering at all, she leaned in to kiss his cheek, and, very rapidly, without him getting a word in, left the cottage, walking out into the afternoon drizzle. She realised too late that she had left her mobile on his coffee table. Oh well, she thought. Who would phone her. She could get it back later. Or perhaps send Warlock? Satan, why had she done that? That was weird. It was weird, wasn’t it? It was weird. She glanced back over her shoulder, as surreptitiously as she could, and could just about make out Francis, holding his hand to his cheek, just where she kissed him. She couldn’t make out his expression.

She was distracted, when she got back to the house, seeing Warlock and his mother had returned, and so she had no time to dwell on it that evening. The boy had gotten quite a lot of sugary treats, it turned out, and had little to no interest in the concept of going to bed. He demanded another episode of his show, and then another one, and Ashtoreth, severe as she might look and act, was very bad at actually being strict with the boy. As such, Warlock was not in bed and asleep until 21:30, at which point Ashtoreth felt quite tired too.

It wasn’t, she told herself, as if she were attracted to Brother Francis. That would be ridiculous, what with his teeth and terrible eyebrow and beard grooming. With the absurd clothing choices and the terrible tea. He was lovely. She loved him as a friend, nothing more. She was merely… Confused. A bit lonely, perhaps. She couldn’t remember the last time she had been in a relationship, though, clearly, there was a lot she could not remember. No, that must be it. She was a bit lonely, and he was so very kind, and such a good friend, and for a moment she thought about how thick his thighs were, and what they might feel like either side of her head. 

She groaned, and turned so her face was smashed into the pillow, fabric bunched up against her eyes hard enough that bright greenish purple lights drowned out any mental images for a moment. This was, she decided, not happening. It was, uh… It was unprofessional, was what it was. Surely there was some sort of rule against this? She would have to reread her contract. And anyway, it was a bad idea, and probably Francis was wondering what on Earth had gotten into her. She probably wasn’t his type. Lovely soft women, probably, were what he liked. Who looked like they could run a farm and have hordes of children. Or men. He didn’t strike her as queer, but maybe the whole small town west country farmer thing was some trauma he was still working through.

“Shut up,” she said, out loud, to herself. 

Her brain did not obey. This was not what she needed. She was busy panicking about her memory and mental health, thank you very much, she did not need some frivolous feelings nonsense on top of all that. Her mind supplied her with the image of Francis sharing this bed, a warm and comforting arm around her, those stupid muttonchops tickling the back of her neck. This was bad. 

She got very little sleep that night, and what she did get was filled with strange dreams of the two of them, as medieval knights of all things, and rather incompetent ones at that.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The cat, for those wondering, is named Oscat Wilde, because when Aziraphale was adopted by him he had been living in the wild, and because the angel thought it was terribly funny at the time. The name is not particularly accurate, in that the cat had only in fact been living in the wild for about three days, after being abandoned by an employee at the house who left rather abruptly, almost as if some positions had to be miracled free. And by The Wild, I here mean, on the property but like. Outdoors. Oscat Wilde prefers his new owner, because he always forgets he has already fed him, and treats abound, and he hasn't had to go to the vet in five years.


	4. Together

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A more celestial perspective on the goings on

She had kissed him. She had kissed him right there, on his cheek! Ashtoreth had kissed him. Francis put a hand over the spot, to feel whether it was burning quite so much as he thought it ought to. He had watched, helpless, as she rushed out of the cottage and into the rain, clearly regretting her mistake. But he couldn’t blame her, could he? She had meant it as a friend would, surely, and then realised what he might mistake it for. Oh, he would reassure her when next they met, he would, tell her that of course he understood, it hadn’t meant anything, he knew they were just friends. He knew she could never be interested in someone like him. Well, he wouldn’t say that last part out loud. She’d only feel guilty, and he didn’t want her to feel bad.

Francis wasn’t entirely sure whether he had always been in love with her. Probably he had been, he must have been, surely? She was so elegant, and refined, and kind and caring. She was so intelligent, so witty, so sure of herself and terribly, devastatingly beautiful. And she was in crisis. And he had to help her figure out what was going on, not think about his own feelings, not indulge in them as if they ever could be requited. No. Focus, he thought, on this memory business. 

Looking out the window he could see her figure, like a black spike, blurred by rain, disappear around the corner of the main house. He sighed, and got up, and made himself another cup of tea. 

“What am I going to do about this, dear boy?” he asked, addressing the cat who was busy cleaning his ear.

He sipped his tea for a moment, scolding his tongue, as he waited as if for an answer. Oscat Wilde had nothing to offer other than an inquisitive expression that usually meant “treats? Treats for me the very good boy?”, and, as usual, Francis could not find it in himself to deny the increasingly fat cat anything. 

As the cat lay, gorging on treats and purring madly in his lap, trying his very best to dip his tail into the tea cup Francis had to keep delicately manoeuvring out of reach, he thought. Warlock had said Ashtoreth wasn’t quite herself, and she had agreed. Losing her memories. It was strange, like something out of a novel, and he stared at his many and tightly packed bookshelves as if their inhabitants might contain answers. It was funny, he felt sure that he had read all of them, but though he tried he couldn’t quite remember what most of them were about. But then, a brain only had so much space, hadn’t it? And he could remember quite clearly all his time here. Could remember the last dozen or so books he’d read, but he had hundreds, probably around two thousand, between the living room and the full wall of shelves in the bedroom upstairs. He couldn’t quite remember where he had gotten them all, come to think of it. Most looked terribly old, not like something you could get in your local chain bookshop, but like carefully preserved heirlooms. The copy of Wuthering Heights looked like it could well have been a first edition.

“Hold on,” he said to the uncaring cat, now gently napping, twitching its way into sleep.

He tried to think back. Last few years, good. Spending time with Ashtoreth, occasionally looking after Warlock, teaching him about All God’s Creatures, and The Importance of Being Gentle, all fine. Getting hired for this job, yes. The slightly sceptical looks and hint of disdain that still stung a little now, five years later. That too was all clear. Some of the individual days as such were blurry, but that’s what happened when your life fell into a routine. An action is repeated so much that it just becomes one, happening over and over again with slight variations. But before?

There had been a nearby village, he thought, in which he had lived before moving here. What was it called? Something terribly quaint and British, he found he couldn’t quite put his finger on it. And before that? Where did he come from? What had he done with his life, other than amass a rather spectacular amount of books that looked like they belonged in an antiques shop? He had been a gardener before, he thought. Vague ideas of planting and planning gardens, of carefully choosing flowers danced through his mind without ever quite settling into proper, clear images. 

“This is bad,” he informed the cat, who failed to surface into consciousness. 

This couldn’t be a coincidence, could it? Both him and Ashtoreth? Could they both have begun to suffer from simultaneous cases of early onset dementia? It seemed unlikely. Had they both hit their heads at the exact same time and then immediately forgotten about it? No. It was just gradual enough, or felt like it. Why hadn’t this occurred to him before now? Was his life so full here that he never considered his past at all? Did he use to remember, or had he simply lived to in the moment, despite the serene and quiet circumstances in which he found himself? He needed to talk to Ashtoreth again. Despite what had happened just half an hour ago, no matter how awkward it might be, this was too important a development to postpone.

“I’m so sorry, my dear, but I need to use the telephone,” he informed the cat, gently nudging it to the empty spot next to him on the sofa.

He got up, walked over to the old fashioned rotary phone he kept, which stood on its own little table, on top of a tiny, frilly tablecloth. He knew Ashtoreth’s number by heart, despite rarely if ever having called her. He did not stop to consider why this might be. He dialled, waited, and then heard a loud, obnoxious and exceptionally tinny song from behind a pile of books on his coffee table. Ah. He hung up. Checked the clock on the wall. It was a few hours yet till the boy would be in bed. He would wait till the next day. Yes. Try to spend some more time in the attempt to remember.

It did not go well. He fell asleep in his chair, waking around midnight with a terrible paint in his neck. Too late, now, far too late to go over there. And the next day, he didn’t have a chance to see her at all. She had to take Warlock somewhere, and they were away the whole day. The young boy was certainly busy. But Francis spent the day looking through his books, looking for some sort of clue to what could have happened, but found nothing. A few brief hours were spent tending to the garden, as the weather had lightened up, and he had read somewhere that fresh air was good for your brain, but it didn’t help at all. He got a thorn stuck inside the skin of his finger and spent a solid and frustrating hour with a pair of tweezers attempting to get it out, not remembering anything useful in the process.

He sat down, and wrote down all the facts he could remember, or thought he could remember, about his past. It wasn’t much. It was, as Ashtoreth had described, a list of facts, rather than proper memories, than a proper life. It was very strange.

-

That night, Francis let himself in through the back entrance. He was, after all an employee, he did have a key. The security guard stationed just inside gave him a funny look, like he was some sort of joke, and he supposed to these very fit, very masculine and self important people he was. Well, that was unfair, there were female security guards employed there as well, although in all other respects they were much the same. He felt like he hadn’t taken the time to get to know them, although he couldn’t be entirely sure. Couldn’t be sure of anything these days, he thought. Although he was on friendly terms with the chef, supplying her with some of the herbs and vegetables from the garden, and getting to be a guinea pig for new recipes in return, which was certainly worth all his struggle with the tomatoes.

The long hallways of the house were mostly quiet, now. He could hear quiet music from somewhere, but wasn’t sure what room it was; he had only been in this part of the house a handful of times. The interior was odd, a mixture of the inherent decorative architectural elements of centuries and decades past, partially updated but never fully, and the 60s minimalist art that whichever interior decorator they had hired apparently favoured. It felt like the purpose of it was to intimidate and show off, rather than be someone’s home. He vastly preferred his cozy, cluttered little cottage, thank you very much.

The room to Warlock’s door was recognizable by the fancy brass plaque proclaiming it to be such, but even more by the countless stickers on the lower half of it, which someone had tried very hard to remove, but not quite succeeded. And if he remembered right, it was one door between, and then to the right. Yes, this was it, he thought. It had her undefinable sort of aura about it. Either that, or it smelled faintly of her perfume. He knocked.

“Francis?” Ashtoreth said, surprised, door opened a crack. 

She had clearly not been expecting anyone. Her sunglasses were askew, as if frantically put on before opening the door.

“Yes, I’m terribly sorry to disturb you so late, my dear, but do you mind terribly? Here, you left your mobile telephone in my cottage, I brought it.”

“Oh,” she said, “yes, thank you, I-”

“Could I come in, just for a minute. I’ve something to tell you, about, ah, about what you were telling me earlier?”

“Err,” she said, “yes, yes, come in. Excuse the mess.”

The mess, he discovered, consisted of an open laptop and two wires on the floor, and a pair of shoes not tucked into the closet. He would almost have thought she was making fun of him, had he not known better.

Ashtoreth glanced out into the hallway before closing the door. He wondered, briefly, if she were worried what people would think, him coming to visit her at this time of night. Well, it was only nine, but she had changed into a nightgown, and put her hair down. Francis wished she would keep it like that more often. It fell in much looser and more natural waves just past her shoulders, moving freely except for where she had missed a pin. Though the nightgown she wore was as modest as anything else she wore, it felt suddenly terribly intimate, and he felt his cheeks starting to heat up. Not the time for this.

“I can’t remember either,” he told her, so quick the words almost melted into each other.  
“What do you mean?”

“Well,” he said, “as you were saying. Life before I came to work here? I hadn’t thought about it, you know, for a time, and when I tried to it simply wasn’t there. I’ve no idea still what’s happened to you, but I think it’s me as well.”

“Shit,” she said, running a hand through her hair, “all-right. That’s- that’s not good, is it. That’s… That’s terrible.”

“Yes, I thought so. Thought it best to tell you as soon as you were back. I’d have tried to find out more, I really would, but I had no idea where to start. Other than trying to sort out what I do and don’t remember. But I...”

He faltered, looked at her, and then down at the floor.

“I wanted you to know you’re not alone in this, whatever it may turn out to be.”

“Oh,” she said, quiet, just above a whisper.

“Thank you, my dear,” she told him, a warm smile on her face, “I appreciate it. We shall have to try to figure it out together, then.”

“Yes,” he agreed, seeing his own eyes reflected in her sunglasses, “together.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter brought to you by my body's refusal to let me sleep more than three hours at a time. It's 05:42 and I hate being conscious.  
> Anyway, hope some of you are enjoying this story, and my apologies if the dialogue seems too much like how I normally write them, especially Francis/Aziraphale, but Crowley/Ashtoreth too. Writing any region specific dialects for what is technically my fourth language is, uhh, challenging, and I'd rather have it come off as too neutral than too caricatured. I do try to sound out all the dialogue in my head, to make sure I can hear it in their voice, but their dialogue is so brief that it is a little difficult to be completely sure.


	5. V

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Attempts to unveil infernal plots, as well as counterplots to reinforce the previously mentioned infernal plots (implied)

Somewhere in Hell a demon was muttering to themselves in frustration, bent over a table covered in half unrolled scrolls. Most of them were discoloured, with patches of mould and other, more unpleasant things growing on them, nearly obscuring the complex constellations of sigils. The demon was struggling. They needed to reverse the curse they had put on the demon Crowley soon, before any of their superiors realised. Before they checked. They could handle, they thought, the wrath of Crowley, but not that of Beelzebub. Rumour was, anyway, among the lower downs, that the serpent had gone a bit soft, up there on Earth. Probably less likely to drown them in holy water, laughing as they melted.

It wasn’t, so far, easy. It wasn’t a curse designed to be lifted. I was, after all, meant only for the angel Aziraphale, who no one had any intention of curing. So. Curing Crowley, top of the not get killed to do list. Avoiding all superiors in the meantime was up there also. There were so many scrolls left to go through.

-

Warlock noticed the difference in his two favourite adults after a day or two. Something in them had changed again. They were both a bit secretive, it seemed, but in a different way to what they used to be when they acted normal. Like there was something they were trying to keep from him, only they were quite bad at it. But they were talking again, and looking at each other with stupid smiling faces when they thought the other wasn’t looking, so at least that was good. He had tried to investigate further, like he saw on TV, but so far it had not yielded any results, primarily because he hadn’t known where to look, and unlike in his games, looking at the world through a magnifying glass only made his head feel funny after a while. 

One day he tried asking Nanny about it, in case she was more open than Brother Francis. She usually was better at answering his questions, especially the kind which other adults didn’t want him knowing the answers to, like what the Bad Words actually meant, or how to spell dismemberment. That one was still hard, though.

He waited till after play time, after he had been especially good at tidying up, and had given Nanny a hug after she helped him put away the things that went on the shelf that was too high for him to reach. (Even she would not let him climb up on it, saying, like his mom, that he could fall and hurt himself bad, and apparently some bad behaviours were worse than others, because that was strictly forbidden.)

“Nanny,” he said, tugging on her sleeve to get her attention, which was currently directed out of the window and into the garden.

“Yes?”

“Are you okay?”

She turned, looking down at him, forehead creased. There was just the faintest hint of red in her cheeks.

“Yes, my dear, of course. Why do you ask?”

Warlock paused, debating with himself how he could best phrase this, so as to cause minimal suspicion and offence.

“I miss you being normal,” he settled on, and, upon seeing Nanny’s face, realised that this was perhaps not the way to go about it. 

“Am I not?” Nanny asked carefully, after a moment, during which she seemed to be trying to control her facial features.

“No,” Warlock said, because she had, after all, asked, and she was, after all, not.

Nanny sat down on the floor next to him, legs crossed at an uncomfortable looking angle to make this possible in her long, tight skirt. 

“What makes you say that?”

Warlock frowned.

“You asked.”

A smile tugged at the corner of her mouth.

“True. My mistake, dear. What makes you think that I am acting strange? What am I usually like?”

“Well,” he said, frowning in concentration, trying to remember how she used to say it “you usually spend a lot more time telling me about how I will crush the world under my heel and burn my enemies alive in the fires of Hell.”

“Oh dear,” she said.

“And that I will have an infernal army that will be mine to command, that will follow me and punish anyone who won’t listen to me. Like Brother Francis’ cat. He never listens. Cats are stupid. Do you think mom will let me have a dog? One that is just mine, not just one of the guard dogs? They never want to play, and that’s no fun at all.”

He was veering slightly from his point, admittedly, but this particular question was important to him.

“I, ah, well,” said Nanny, and paused, seeming to settle on the easiest question to deal with.

“Your mother might let you have a dog when you’re a little older, but you must remember, dogs require a lot of training and attention. They’re fun, of course, but they are also a lot of responsibility, and the staff aren’t paid to watch your dog for you.”

This was, of course, the wrong answer. Usually, Nanny would smile, and seem to wink, though it was always hard to tell behind those glasses, and promise that he would get a dog for his eleventh birthday, and then suddenly look a bit sad. Then, when Warlock complained that this was at least five forevers in the future, she would look even more sad, and promise him that while it might feel like that now, it certainly was not going to be the case in the future.

“Would you watch my dog?” Warlock asked, pushing these thoughts away, “if I asked you nicely?”

“Of course, my dear. But that’s hardly a problem yet, is it?”

This was also wrong, as Nanny did not like to be accused of being nice. He must have looked upset, because Nanny put an arm around him and told him that if he asked his mom nicely he might get a dog, and that was certainly better than trying to teach the poor cat anything.  
-  
Ashtoreth felt unsettled. It had been her primary feeling for nearly a week now, and she was not enjoying it. After the strange conversation with Warlock she had spent some time internet stalking herself. This had proved difficult not only because she didn’t seem to have much of an internet presence, but even more so because she couldn’t remember any of her passwords, and so only had access to her Facebook account, which was automatically logged in, and had only been created four years ago. It was disconcertingly empty. She had less than fifty friends on there, many of whom were current or former employees of the Dowlings. There were very few pictures, though she could see that two of her previous profile pictures were photographs of snakes, which was odd. She was fairly certain she had never had a pet snake, though of course she had her tattoo. That had to have some significance. Her profile's about section was also empty.

A general google of her name brought up a Linkedin page, which listed several previous jobs in various forms of childcare, though when she searched for the listed employers they did not seem to exist. She could see from her browser history and suggested pages that she used twitter a lot, but there was no suggested account when she tried to log in, and searching her name yielded no account results. Frustrating.

Just for fun she tried to google Brother Francis, but, predictably, got no relevant results. She closed the laptop, and sighed. Earlier she had tried to do some more research on what sort of neurological or psychological conditions that could cause this sort of memory loss, but she still could not find anything.

She had also tried to figure out what Warlock was talking about. Demon armies and the ruling of the world, but all she had found was stuff about a Christian concept of Armageddon. Which, naturally, she was familiar with. There was also a lot of fantasy fiction about the topic, naturally, but nothing that seemed suitable for children, nothing that seemed like something she would have watched or read or played with him, and what else could the reason possibly be for the things he insisted she usually did? It wasn't as if her Satanism was theistic.

She got out her phone. It was the newest one, the iphone 5, and she wondered briefly how much she made that she was able to afford this, mere weeks after it had been released. Childcare wasn't typically, she thought, all that lucrative. The patriarchy and the devaluing of labour typically carried out by women and all that. Perhaps there was something to burning and reshaping the world, as Warlock said. But then, she supposed, working 24/7 and living on the premises was significantly better than paying 90% of her pay in rent in London. She had a vague and inexplicable feeling that that was her fault, but that made no sense. Shaking her head, she started typing out a text to Francis, which she got two paragraphs into before remembering he only had a rotary phone from the sixties.

Fuck. 

Her phone said it was 23:42. Was it too late to call a colleague? Technically, yes. Would he be asleep? Probably. Was she going to anyway? Yes.

The phone rang seven times before it was picked up.

"Evening," a sleep hoarse voice mumbled, "I appreciate that this is your job and all, but please stop trying to sell me your insurance, thank you very much. Goodb-"

"Francis," she interrupted, "it's me."

There were a few seconds of silence on the line, and she could hear a high pitched meow and a dull thump from the background.

"Ashtoreth? Oh, it is lovely to hear from you, my dear. Did you know it's nearly midnight? I'm afraid I had fallen asleep, you see. Wasn't expecting to hear from you."

"Yes, sorry. I was going to text or send an email, but you only have a two centuries old phone, so, ultimately, this is your own fault."

Francis huffed.

"This telephone's perfectly serviceable, my dear, what would I need any of those newfangled devices for? People barely call me as it is."

"Well, for one you could see who is calling you an avoid berating your closest friend for attempting to sell you insurance."

There was a soft intake of breath on the other side, and a pause. Ashtoreth briefly missed having an old fashioned phone herself, if only to have a coiled cord to twirl, somewhere to put her nervous energy. What was she nervous about? Didn't matter. Nothing, that was what.

"You, ah- consider me your closest friend?"

His voice sounded careful, guarded, nearly worried.

"Yes? Are you not? Sorry, I shouldn't have assumed you do the same for me, I-"

"No! No, I do, my dear, I..."

There was a lengthier pause, filled with slightly too tense a silence, just their breathing, barely audible over the line. Ashtoreth got out of her bed and walked over to the window, and if she stood at just the right angle, bending into the windowsill just a bit, she could see the pinprick of warm orange light from Francis' cottage.

"I'm glad," she said.

"Me too."

"Anyway," she said, eager to break the tension, distract from the feelings they both clearly needed to express, "I was wondering if you had found anything more? You said you were doing some research, and I've not seen you in the gardens the last two days, so I assumed you had been reading up on, well, whatever it is you hopefully have."

"Oh."

He sounded faintly disappointed.

"Well, yes, I did find... well, _something_. But you better come over to have a look. Do you have time tomorrow?"

"Oh, right, yes, that's probably better. Warlock's going off with his mum to visit some other Americans, I believe, around noon. I'll come then?"

"I'll look forward to it," he promised, voice gentle, "good night then."

"Good night."

Ashtoreth hung up, though she remained at the window a while longer, until she saw the distant light darken. She put her palm to the glass, feeling the cool of the early autumn night. Though she still felt full of anxious energy, she managed to fall asleep rather quickly.  
-  
Right around noon the next day, after promising Mrs. Dowling Warlock was ready for a visit, all dressed up nice and informed of the importance of being on his best behaviour, Ashtoreth was fixing her hair. It was perfect, of course, it always was, she was very good at putting it up this way by now, yet still she fussed. She had put on some light lipstick, wiped it off, and reapplied it. This was nonsense, she told her mirror. This did not stop her either, and it was another fifteen minutes before she left her room.

The weather was quite nice, finally. A little cloudy, but bright with shafts of sunlight streaming down like heavenly light. She found Francis sitting on a bench outside his cottage, reading a very tiny and incredibly old looking book and wearing some equally old fashioned little reading glasses. It was, she thought, about equally endearing and ridiculous. He seemed to absorbed in his book to notice her approach, so she sat down next to him, smirking just a tiny bit as he jumped.

"Reading anything good?"

"My dear girl, hello! You rather startled me!"

"Sorry," she said, in a tone intended to indicate that she, in fact, was not.

She leaned over too peer at the incredibly densely packed and tiny text he was reading.

"I didn't know you spoke Latin?"

"What did you think," he asked, "The Brother part meant?"

"Fair," she admitted, "so, have you found anything helpful?"

"Well," he said.

"Well?"

"Well. Not, as such, no, not helpful. But I was thinking about what the lad mentioned, all the demons and hellfire and such. Which, it turns out, I have rather a lot of books on."

"You have?"

"Hundreds, actually. Old books of prophecy, occult texts, books of rituals, books on demonology, all sorts of things."

"Convenient. Strange."

"Yes," he agreed, and got up, motioning for her to follow him in.

As he made the obligatory cup of slightly unpleasant home made tea (no, dear, I still don't have any coffee. If it's that important you can bring your own,) she browsed the packed bookshelves lining the walls of the cottage. She had never considered it before, just how many books he had. It was almost as if he'd raided a second hand bookshop and stashed it all in this room. It didn't quite line up with the person he gave the impression of being, though she doubted anyone but her and Warlock ever spent any time in there. Not much reason to put up a façade, she supposed.

"Where did you get all of these?" she asked, running her fingers over cracked leather spines with faded gold lettering in a variety of languages.

"Don't know," he told her cheerfully, setting the tea down on the table.

They both sat on the sofa this time, on either side. It was, however, a small sofa, and there wasn't much room between them. She chose not to focus on this, instead sipping her tea too quickly, burning her tongue. The taste did not make up for the pain even a little bit.

"Look here," Francis said, manoeuvring out a book from the middle of a tall and unstable looking pile.

"I found these fascinating woodcuts in this book, and-" he paused, scanning the book titles through his tiny glasses, frowning at them.

"Here! Yes, this one too. Err, let me see, page numbers, page numbers..."

She watched him for a little while, as he carefully looked through pages. Bookmarks were, evidently, not for him. 

"Here!" he said, holding up a page for her to see.

It was tiny, and dark, and she had to bend close to see it. Close enough that it was distracting, that she could hear his breathing, that she could almost feel the heat coming off him. She blinked, focused on the illustration. It was an angel, that much was clear from the wings and the halo, and if she looked really close, she could almost see it.

"That one... looks like you a little bit?"

"Yes! Yes, without the, ah, styling, naturally, but you see it too?"

She looked from the woodcut up to his face, which was suddenly very close to hers. If she ignored the bushy brows and muttonchops, the teeth... Then yes. Yes, she could see it. See those rather cherubic sort of features. See the halo reflected in his storm coloured eyes, although that might have been a reflection from the window. She licked her lips.

"Yes," she said, "yes, I see it."

"Right!" said Francis, his cheeks going a bit red, which she thought was a charming look on him.  
"And this one," he said, holding up a picture in the other book, a pen and ink drawing, which from the styling looked to be from around the 1600s.

She squinted at it. The hair was long and wavy. There was a hooked nose, a familiar chin though it had a rather silly looking beard on it, and tiny round glasses with darkened lenses. She looked up at Francis. He looked expectantly back at her.

"This is a picture of a man," she said, voice careful.

"Ah," Francis said, "details, details, but don't you agree? Might have been your brother?"

She hummed in agreement, though she didn't quite feel it, not till she saw the little squiggle on the side of the illustrated person's face.

"Oh."

"What?"

She fished a handkerchief out of the pocket of her jacket, dipped it in the tea, figuring she was unlikely to finish it, and there were more important stakes than whether Francis continued to believe she liked his tea. She took the damp cloth, scrubbing at her cheek until the dense foundation layer yielded.

"Look," she said, pointing to her face with one hand, and the illustration with the other.

"Oh, look at that," Francis murmured, looking at her tattoo.

"May I?" he asked, lifting his hand.

She swallowed, nodded. He traced the swirling snake with a fingertip.

"This is lovely, dear girl, why on earth do you hide it?"

She shrugged. 

"Didn't seem to fit with the whole respectable nanny thing. Face tattoos and steady employment do not go hand in hand."

"Oh, well," he said, hand now cupping her cheek, so warm against her skin it burned in the best of ways, "you shouldn't have to, dear. Not your eyes, either."

She had a brief moment of panic, trying to remember whether she had showed him, but she didn't have time, because he was, very carefully, lifting them off her face. He did it slowly, giving her the opportunity to stop him, and though her instincts told her to, she didn't.

He gasped softly when he saw, folding her glasses neatly and setting them on the coffee table, his eyes locked on hers the entire time.

"Beautiful," he murmured.

Her heart felt like it was being squeezed by a vice. She could see reflections of her eyes in his glasses, the yellow, the inhuman slit pupils. His hand was back on her cheek, and she covered it with one of hers, and they must have leaned closer to each other, because suddenly there was no more than an inch or two between them, and she could feel his breath on her face. 

She couldn't tell which of them took the initiative, but one of them must have, because quite suddenly they were kissing, and his hand migrated from her cheek to her hair, the other finding her waist and pulling her closer. She had one hand on his chest, another on the back of his neck.  
They pulled apart, breathing hard, looking into each others eyes, hearts beating fast.

"Do.. Do you want to...keep...?"

Francis nodded frantically, and their mouths clashed together again. 

Outside the window, from behind a tree, a demon squinted at the goings on inside the cottage, and grimaced. That, the demon thought, was a lot less than ideal. They were going to have to work a lot harder and faster to fix this than they thought.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry I've not been good at updating but uni courses have started up again and I always forget how much dang reading is involved. However, I am taking sexology, which is inspiring me, naturally, to finish watching Masters of Sex, which, again, will inspire me to write Sheen character centric smut. Not actually Masters of Sex fanfic, though, because technically that's rpf and that's, uh, not my thing. Also I see I've sort of slipped back into just writing their dialogue as Crowley and Aziraphale. Oops. Also thank you lots to the people who've left comments. Validation adds like 25% speed to my writing.


	6. Soaring

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> 😇A development occurs😇

They didn’t have all that much time to enjoy their newfound… well, their newfound _something_ that day. Only an hour after Ashtoreth had arrived at the cottage, Mrs. Dowling called, saying Warlock had gotten sick, and she was turning around, coming to drop him off to be taken care of. Still, the gardener and the nanny made the best of the time they had left, spending perhaps a tenth of it discussing the strange pictures, and the remaining ninth kissing and staring into each other’s faces with expressions Warlock would have called silly.

The next three days were quite busy, and they saw each other little. The boy had a fever, and was sick enough to have to stay in bed, but well enough to be deeply dissatisfied with the situation, and demanded near constant attention and entertainment. Ashtoreth spent long days reading to him, playing whatever board games could be played while being precariously perched on a wriggly five year old’s bed, playing video games and watching painfully bad cartoons.

Every evening, though, after singing or reading to the boy until he fell asleep, an indulgence he these days mostly got when he was ill, she retreated to her room and called Francis. She could, of course, have gone out, gone down to his cottage, or he came to her, but she didn’t want to take the risk of Warlock coming to look for her in the night and either finding her gone or finding Francis in her bedroom. It was too early to have that sort of conversation with the boy, and frankly she was enjoying the excited longing which gripped her at whatever idle moments she had throughout the day. She was so preoccupied with this, in fact, that she hardly thought about their shared memory loss situation until the morning of the fourth day, when Francis called her at five thirty in the morning.

She grasped for her phone, attempting to hit the snooze button, until she squinted at the too bright screen and seeing Francis’ name. Perhaps this was payback for the time she called him at midnight.

“Grshnnk,” she said, which was about as eloquent as she felt anyone would be at this time of night.

“Hello my dear girl, I’m so sorry to wake you, but there is something you absolutely need to see, and no, it can’t wait. Perhaps you had better bring some of that coffee you’re so partial to and come down. Can you?”

Though he spoke politely, she could hear the slight manic edge of fear in his voice. It sounded serious.

“Ngh?”

“Lovely, see you in about ten minutes.”

He hung up.

“Gnnh,” Ashtoreth said to no one in particular.

She was, despite the demands of her current job, not a morning person. Through necessity she had gotten used to going to bed early enough that she could be ready to wake her charge at eight in the morning, but five thirty was simply unacceptable. Still. It was Francis. He had sounded rather desperate.

She hauled herself out of the bed, splashed some cold water on her face in the bathroom and immediately regretted it, and dressed in her work clothes. There would probably not be time for a make-up nap before she actually had to start. She ran her fingers briefly through her hair, which made it messier, and put on her glasses, figuring everything else could wait.

There was no time for the fancier coffee machines, but she grabbed a jar of instant coffee from the kitchens, figuring something that cheap was probably meant for the staff, of which she was part. They had more. It was fine.

One of the security guards on the night shift smirked at her as she hurried out, and she glared at him, though the gesture was probably lost behind her glasses. Besides, whatever he was thinking wasn’t all that wrong, really. She’d overheard some of the other staff members talking, and apparently there were already rumours about her and Francis. She had blocked out the details of what they were saying, though not the laughter.

Outside it was cold, the grass wet with dew, and the sky wet with rain. Shortly Ashtoreth too was wet with rain, though she hurried as fast as she could, cutting across the grass for speed, which had the entirely unpredictable effect of her shoes getting soaked through.

The lights were on it the cottage, as always a beacon of warm light against the unpleasantness of the outside world, currently both figuratively and literally. She knocked, and rather than open, Francis shouted that the door was unlocked. Ashtoreth did so, kicking of her wet shoes and shrugging out of her damp coat by the door, and walking into the main room.

“Hell-“ she managed before being too stunned by what she saw to form words for a solid minute.

The first thing she saw was that Francis was shirtless. He wore only a pair of tartan pyjama bottoms, and fuzzy socks. She had considered, behind closed eyes, what he might look like without clothes, and she was not disappointed. He looked soft, but there was some hint of strength behind it. His chest was covered in tightly curled hair, and she thought she might like to rest her head there. She noted this for a later time.

The second thing she noticed was far stranger. It was his face. At least she was reasonably certain the face belonged to him, but she couldn’t be entirely sure. The vast and wild muttonchops were gone, his face smooth as if just shaven. His eyebrows were trimmed into neat arches. He seemed to have had rather a lot of dental work done, too, since last she saw him. His eyes, though, remained the same, as did his fluffy white-blond curls. All these changes seemed, based on her knowledge of him as of yet, to be possible, if unlikely. Particularly the teeth, she thought, was something he probably would have had to go into London to have had done in just three days.

The third thing she noticed, and which was somehow less plausible than the cosmetic changes, were the enormous white wings that sprouted from his shoulders. At least she assumed they did, because he certainly wasn’t wearing any kind of harness. They rose a little above his shoulders, and the tips of them just about touched the floor. She motioned for him to turn around, and he did so, the wings knocking a few books to the floor. They were, she saw, firmly attached to his back, just between his shoulder blades.

“What,” she said, “on earth is going on?”

“I don’t know!” Francis said, craning his head to look at her over his shoulder and accidentally nudging her with his wing.

She flinched, surprised at the solid realness of it. It was as if he had become the figure he showed her in the woodcut earlier. She ran her fingers over the invisible seam where they joined his back, feeling the downy softness of the smallest of the feathers where they tapered out in a sort of gradient into smooth skin. He shivered.

“I woke up,” he told her, “and there they were! Wings! Just, just wings! Moving and feeling as if they’re part of me!”

She stroked across the edge of one wing, following the smooth layers of feathers, feeling the way the muscles within flexed, reacting to her touch, as if they were real, as if this was something that could actually be happening. It was ridiculous. Absurd. Bizarre.

“Can-“ she began, stroking over the wings again, fascinated by the elegant shapes of them, not quite realising it was still part of him she was touching, “can you fly?”

“What?”

Francis sounded genuinely baffled. His eyes were wide, staring out at of that now faintly unfamiliar face.

“Well,” she reasoned, “you have wings. Do you think you can fly?”

Francis made a small, confused noise, and turned to face her, accidentally smacking her with a wing, clearly unused to the extra space around him they filled.

“I’ve no idea,” he told her, looking helpless.

“What happened to your face?” she asked, looking for a slightly safer subject, “did you get yourself a makeover for my sake?”

“What?”

She frowned at him.

“Have you not noticed?”

“Noticed what?”

He sounded almost impatient. She got her phone out of her pocket, and held it up, snapping a photo of him blinking at the brightness of the flash. She held it up for him to see.

“Oh,” he said, “no. That.. That must have happened with the wings? I’ve not really been focusing on any details other than these… These _things_.”

He gestured at the wings, which moved in almost matching arcs to his arms, knocking into the edge of the table.

“Ow,” he added, “this room isn’t quite big enough to accommodate them, it seems.”

Ashtoreth sat down on the edge of the sofa, and blinked at him. It really was far too early for anything to be happening, particularly anything like this. Wings. Great bloody huge wings, just sitting there on his back like they had been part of him this entire time.

“It’s… a good look for you, the wings,” she said, because she felt the silence needed to be filled with _something_ , even if she couldn’t actually think of anything sensible to say.

Francis just looked at her, confused and scared.

“I, ah, thank you? But what do we _do_ about these? I can’t go round with wings! I can’t get any of my shirts on, for one thing.”

Shirts. Of all the absurd things to focus on. Shirts. Nonsense. Everything that was happening to them was just sheer nonsense. If there was any sort of higher power she wanted to have a stern word with them about messing with the minds and lives and, now, bodies, of poor innocent humans.

Francis sat down next to her on the sofa, manoeuvring his wings –his wings!- to lay across the back of it awkwardly, causing him to have to lean forward a bit to get the angle right. She took of her glasses, folding them and placing them on the table. Her eyes were downright mundane, now, by comparison.

He looked like an angel. It wasn’t just the wings, though naturally they were evocative of celestial things. It was the way his face was so soft, now, devoid of ridiculous facial hair. Almost pretty. The way his hair caught the soft glow of sun just beginning to seep in from the horizon, almost like a halo. The soft roundedness of his body, too, like a renaissance ideal of a godly messenger. He was beautiful and shining. It seemed almost a shame that they would have to figure out a way to get rid of the wings.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Gotta get early shifts a work more, apparently, wrote this all before 9 in the morning today. Effective. Not edited at all because I gotta do my job for the rest of this shift now 😔


	7. The Snake Beneath Your Wings

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Francis and Ashtoreth have some thoughts on what might be happening to them and also there's some more smooching.

“I really do think you ought to give flying a try, you know. Before we hopefully manage to get them to go away.”

“And how would I manage that? This is- is the modern world, my dear, as you keep reminding me. The grounds have security cameras and things, I remember you pointing them out to me so I could-”

Francis faltered, and frowned. Why had that been important to know again? It had not been so long ago, either, and he remembered Ashtoreth using her parrot umbrella to point them out while Warlock fought a small shrub with a long pointy stick.

“Well, either way. It wouldn’t do to be seen on the cameras looking like some kind of freak.”

“More like an angel,” Ashtoreth pointed out, and when he looked at her those strange yellow eyes were soft.

He thought about that day they had last week, when their attempt at working out what had been happening to them, when they had ended up making out like newly in love teenagers. A blush threatened to spread across his face, and now that his facial hair had, for whatever reason, disappeared, his felt felt rather naked. He attempted to move only one of his wings, to fold it around Ashtoreth’s shoulder, but he hadn’t yet gotten the hang of controlling these strange new limbs, and so he ended up just sort of knocking her in the head.

“Sorry,” he told her, but she waved away his apology, stroking a few careful fingers along the edge of his wing.

It felt so strange, that he could feel the pressure and warmth of her fingers through his feathers, on the skin of his wing. Every way he thought about it it just got less possible.

“You said you just woke up with them, yes?” she asked, very carefully grasping the edge of his wing, unbending it slightly, watching the shift of his feathers with narrowed eyes.

“Yes,” Francis replied, his voice just slightly higher pitched than it usually was.

Ashtoreth yawned.

“I think,” she said, “that we ought to call in sick for today, both of us. They can figure something out for Warlock, and I don’t know about you but I’ve not missed a single day in five years.”

“You think we can figure it out that quick?”

She shrugged.

“It will give us some time to think, at least. It’s lucky it’s you and not me.”

“What? Why?”

“Oh, don’t be insulted. You live here, far off, and no one’s going to notice if they don’t see you for a day. I live up at the house, it’s a bit more noticeable if I suddenly sprout wings or disappear.”

“I suppose,” he agreed.

Ashtoreth gently guided his wing to rest around her shoulders, squeezing just a little closer on the sofa, so the edge of her skirt was barely an inch from his thigh. He looked up into slitted yellow eyes. Had they always been so yellow? Did they not just use to be the yellow pupils? Wasn’t there until just a moment ago whites surrounding them? Well, slightly inhuman cat like eyes were still far more normal than suddenly sprouting to new limbs. Which, did these technically make him an insect? He hoped not. While he did of course, as someone who had spent some time in a Franciscan order -and wasn’t that a lovely example of nominative determinism?- love all God’s creatures great and small equally, he had to admit to having a softer spot for vertebrates. 

Ashtoreth leaned in, a hand on his cheek, distracting him from his thoughts with a soft kiss. This time, as he turned fully towards her, his wings wrapped themselves around her without the conscious interference of his brain. The effect was of the two of them, wrapped in a dark and warm cocoon (again with the insect thoughts) of feathers. He wondered, worried, whether the fact his face had changed, that he had become more normal looking, was the reason she kissed him. She had asked, hadn’t she, whether he had had something done for her sake? But no, that couldn’t be it, could it? Surely not, given she had had no issue with kissing him for a solid hour when he looked like himself. He hoped that was the case. 

“Have you seen your eyes?” he asked, when they were, tragically, forced to pull apart for air, his wings releasing them, fluttering, and knocking over another pile of books.

“Only they are a little more intense than usual,” he explained, “but as beautiful as ever.”

Ashtoreth frowned, fishing a small mirror out of a pocket. She didn’t strike him as someone who kept mirrors on them at all times, didn’t strike him as all that vain, but perhaps it was an essential of the usually so perfectly polished look she maintained. She was beautiful, of course, in that way, but Francis was coming to realise he much preferred her like this, without makeup, her hair down and messy, the little snake on her cheekbone visible again. It made him feel privileged in a way, that she no longer felt she had to put up quite as much of a façade with him, even if in this particular case it was because he had called and demanded her precense in the middle of the night.

“Oh,” she said, seeing what had happened, her voice oddly flat.

“They are quite astonishing, my dear girl,” Francis assured her, not noticing that his accent was almost gone, now, that it had been failing for a while.

“They’re… cat-like. Or snake-like, I suppose. I looked myself up on line, and for whatever reason I seem quite taken with snakes. 

“You do have one on your face, so I assume you must like them,” Francis agreed.

“It’s not fair,” Ashtoreth complained, “you getting wings and me getting weird eyes.”

“But your eyes have always been like this, haven’t they? Or not this, this, but how they were? Yellow and slitted?”

“Yes,” she agreed, “but you’re getting angel wings and a haircut and I’m getting even more inhuman eyes and Warlock wanting me to sing about him ruling Hell. It feels a little bit like a moral judgement, you know? Not, my dear Francis, that you are not angelic, but…”

Francis frowned at her.

“I thought you told me you were a satanist? Surely this must be right up your alley, then?”

She shrugged.

“Didn’t really mean to be,” she muttered, “just sort of… Fell into it, I suppose.”

Francis debated making a joke about that, but concluded the mood was not right. He could see what she was saying, like whatever mystical power was doing this to them was saying he was the good one and she the evil one. Which was the absolute farthest from the truth. While she could come off as stern and prickly, and sometimes advocated for giving the roses a good shouting at when they didn’t grow and bloom to her satisfaction, he saw her with Warlock when she thought no one was watching, and it was clear she loved the child. Was kind to him, made sure he was happy, made sure he felt seen even though his parents were always so terribly busy, his father so often away, his mother so often busy with something other than him.

Ashtoreth yawned again, sinking into the sofa a little. 

“I know the shock ought to be keeping me awake,” she said, “but I am so very tired still.”

“If you want to go back to the house to sleep a bit I’d understand,” he told her, though he wished she would not.

“Oh, don’t be stupid,” she said, “I’m not leaving you.”

Some organ, probably one which pumped blood around, did a complicated somersault inside Francis’ chest. He knew she likely meant because of what was going on, but who could blame him for hoping?

“I’ve got a suggestion,” she added, strange eyes looking at him again, “we call in to say we’re sick, probably not at the same time, that might seem suspicious, but still. And then we take a nap. You know, perhaps it’s like computers. We turn ourselves off and back on again, and then we’re magically fixed? At least it can’t make things worse.”

“I don’t understand what that means,” Francis said, “but yes, do let’s try that.”

And so they did, and half an hour later they were up in Francis’ little bedroom. Most of the walls were covered in bookshelves, low to account for the slanted ceiling, but stuffed to the brim with mostly older looking volumes, though a few did seem to have been made after 1920. The bed was not particularly big, but would fit two people if they squeezed together. Francis had offered to take the sofa, and then when refused to just stay awake, as he wasn’t sure whether he could sleep at all, but Ashtoreth, bless her, had announced that was nonsense, and they would share. What, she had perilously argued again, was the worst that could happen? 

Ashtoreth shed her jacket, dropping it carelessly half on a chair stacked high with books, half on the floor. Under she wore a silky black blouse, which she unbuttoned to show more of her neck.

“Too stiff to sleep in,” she explained, “strangles me.”

She sat down on the edge of the bed. Her sunglasses had been left on the coffee table downstairs, and Francis became at last acutely aware of the fact that he was not wearing a shirt. He had been too busy thinking about his wings and his face to properly focus on the fact that she knew how he looked, now, could see the swell of his stomach, the too pale skin, the distinct lack of any hint of visible muscle. He folded his wings around himself.

“Oh, don’t,” she asked, eyes big and yellow and worried.

“Come here, my dear,” she added, holding out a hand.

He swallowed, then let his wings fold back. Moving them was becoming easier, now, like remembering how to do a movement you had practised but then ignored for years. Ancient muscle memory of some sort. Still, he reminded himself not to leave mugs or glasses or anything breakable around until they had managed to sort this all out. 

“All right,” he sat, sitting down on the opposite side of the bed, laying down on his side and attempting to find a comfortable way to fold his wings back while still giving Ashtoreth plenty of space.

She squinted at him, then rolled her eyes, tugging at him until he took up at least a good 60% of the bed. He had to admit, having space to rest his wings on felt significantly better, but he felt awkward about it still. Ashtoreth seemed not to, though, settling down on her side, a hand under her cheek, facing him. She reached over him to stroke his wings again, and his eyes slipped close. It felt, somehow, familiar and strange at the same time. A moment later, he felt her move closer, shifting down the bed a little to rest her head below his, one arm curled between them. It seemed a little awkward, but it also meant he could feel the warmth of her against him. Could feel so clearly the contrast between them, how she was all slender angles and he soft curves. 

“Don’t be so stressed,” she murmured into his throat, so close he could feel her lips against his skin.

“Sorry,” he whispered.

She sighed. Frowning in concentration, he shifted just one wing, bringing it around so it lay over her like a soft feathery blanket. It was still so very odd to get sensory feedback through these strange new appendages, but he appreciated it now. It allowed him to feel as if he were enveloping her, protecting her, which wasn’t an urge he had had before, nor something he thought she needed, but he found the idea of it very appealing nonetheless. An image of himself wielding a flaming sword floated briefly through his head. 

Something in his movement had dislodged a small downy feather from him, and he watched as it slowly floated down to the floor. He dared to put an arm, too, around Ashtoreth, and she let him, moving just a little closer, her body pressed against his. If she minded his body, she gave no indication of it, and seemed, if anything, to think it comfortable. And, well, he could live with that. His body was, after all. Comfortable. Lived in. Like an old favourite sofa, no longer in style, the stuffing a little uneven, but worn in just so, in a way that would take years to achieve with a newer model.

“Night,” Ashtoreth murmured, sounding already half asleep, her breath tickling his skin.

“Sleep well, my dear,” Francis said, placing a feather-light kiss to the top of her perfectly messy hair.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Apologies for the *checks watch* five month break, but I had to take some time to write 2 30+ chapter Good Omens Extended Universe fics. Oops. But I did have ideas for this, the single fic where I actually planned the story in full, if, admittedly, in a single sentence slightly deranged direct message to someone on tumblr at 4am. It's valid.


	8. Snanny (Snake Nanny)

When Ashtoreth woke up, she attempted to open her eyes. This had no effect. Now, you might say that if you opened your eyes and found it was pitch dark, which was indeed the case here, but it also had no effect in the sense that her eyelids didnt move. This, Ashtoreth thought, was strange. She tried to reach up to rub her eyes, but this too failed to elicit any response from her body. In fact she found that she couldn't feel her arms at all. Or, come to think of it, her legs. Shit. 

Ashtoreth tried to move, worried for a moment that while Francis got wings, she got paralysed, or turned into a salt statuette or something similarly dreadful, but luckily she succeeded, even managing to unearth a sliver of light. She considered her surroundings. Warm. Smelled good, she thought, smelled comfortable and familiar. There was something vibrating rapidly inside whatever she was laying on. Strange.

She stretched upwards, towards the sliver of light, and looked into a cavernous room. It looked a little bit like Francis's bedroom, only blown up to ten times the size. Even the books were enormous. Rays of sun shone in through what was usually a very small window, but which in this strange new world seemed massive. She tried to blink, but again nothing happened. Were her limbs and eyelids but nothing else paralysed? That seemed very specific and odd. 

"Oh dear," she heard whispered.

It sounded like Francis's voice, but somehow wrong, distorted. She tried turning around, looking up, and realised that she was on top of his chest, but he too had grown vast, his head towering above her. Which was odd, wasn't it? Everything growing large? Perhaps it was in fact she who had grown smaller? Smaller and... she looked down at herself, at last, but saw only a pile of scaly black coils, shining in the morning sun. Was she under them? But no, beneath was only Francis's very nice and warm skin, the beat of his heart the vibration she had noticed earlier. She shifted, and the coils moved, and she could feel the slide of scales against each other. They were her. This, thought Ashtoreth, was the time to panic.

She had, through whatever magic was controlling the two of them, messing up their lives, been turned into a snake. Which explained the lack of eyelids and limbs. Okay. Okay. Luckily, snake biology seemed less inclined to the physical manifestations of panic than human, and so she didn't experience any of the physical symptoms of a panic attack, even if she did feel like she was, quite possibly, going mad.

After a few minutes of panicking, she became, once more, aware of Francis. He was still taking quick shallow breaths, still looking down at her with wide eyes, his heart beating so very fast. He was scared, she realised, scared of her. Well, scared of a snake, which probably was a pretty normal response, at least when you woke up to find one in your bed without any explanation, your close friend-and-maybe-something-more with whom you had fallen asleep mysteriously gone.

Ashtoreth had to, somehow, convince Francis that she was, well, her. Herself. She opened her mouth to speak, but the only result was a hiss that made Francis flinch.

"Err, good sister snake, would you, oh god, be ever so kind as to perhaps take your nap somewhere else on this fine day?"

He sounded ridiculous, wordy in his fear. She debated whether to listen to him. One the one hand that might make him realise that she understood him, but on the other side it would make it easier for him to deposit her outside, or shove her away with a broom or something. Or, oh dear, get in a fight with Oscat Wilde. She had no desire to be the victim of that large furball's claws any more than she already was when it insisted on laying in her lap and driving it's sharp little claws deep into her skin.

"Only, you see, my lady friend has disappeared, and I would like to check on her," Francis explained to what he believed, apparently, to be an ordinary snake.

She looked at him, and wished she had turned into something with the capacity for facial expressions. How was she supposed to communicate? To show him she was an intelligent being, that she understood, and hopefully, eventually, that she was herself?

Ashtoreth untangled herself, uncoiling into a loose spiral, and noticed that her belly scales were red. Well, at least she kept to her colour scheme, kept her aesthetic. That, she supposed, was something. She tapped the very tip of her tail against the skin over Francis's heart, a soft rhytm, matching his heartbeat. This did not make Francis look less alarmed. All right, not complex enough. Three quick taps, three slow, and three more quick ones. Pause. Repeat. The morse code for sos. Did Francis know morse code? Maybe. She didn't, beyond that simple word, but at least the rhythm was specific, a pattern, not something an animal would just do, surely?

He was frowning at her, which was perhaps a start. She continued tapping, making firm eye contact with him, then paused, looked deliberately at her tail, and then started tapping again for a few minutes more until her tail got tired and she stopped.

"I have a feeling that you are trying to tell me something, my good snake," Francis said.

Ashtoreth nodded vigorously.

"Was that a nod?"

She nodded again.

"Can you shake your head?"

She looked at him for a moment, unsure what response he wanted, and then shook her head.

"Are you going to bite me?" Francis asked.

She shook her head.

"Good, very good, we can work with that. All right. Let me think."

He looked at her, curious now, less inclined to panic. She rose, lifting her head so she could look him in the eye from close up. She saw him swallow, heard his pulse race again, but he betrayed no other signs of fear.

"Are you," he said, peering at her eyes, his face so close she could hear the scraping of his bushy muttonchops, now returned along with the absence of wings, "in fact, my dear Ashtoreth?"

She nodded furiously.

"Ah," he said, "I see. Do you know why you currently appear to be a snake?"

She shook her head.

"No, I supposed you wouldn't, would you. But look at this, you were right, sleeping did make the wings go away, so, splendid job."

She stared at him flatly.

"Well yes, I agree, the snake thing is certainly a complicating factor."

She let herself flop down, slithering up a bit so the main mass of her rested in the centre of his chest, nudging at his arm with her head until he lifted it so she could wind the front third of herself around it to better have access to his face. She let her long forked tongue flick out, the tips tickling against his cheek.

"Oh," he said, and she could see the faintest blush across his cheeks.

Interesting.

"We will find a way to work this out, my dear, I promise you."

-

Somewhere around the fourth circle of Hell, a demon was queueing. They were trying to get to the well hidden and poorly kept archives, but it was always rush hour in Hell, and the damp and cold corridors were perpetually as crowded as a central Paris metro car at four in the afternoon on a Tuesday. The rat atop their head let their tail dangle down in front of their face, and they kept having to push it out of their eyes, like a single heavy strand of disobedient fringe. 

"Fuck," the demon muttered, and glared at the demon in front of them, whose rotting briefcase was poking them in the knee, and also kept leaking a fluid not unlike blood.

Hell was, well, Hell. 

They had managed to figure out that there was, in fact a counter ritual, which required only blood, some sigils and a rudimentary understanding of medieval Latin, all of which came naturally to most demons. The issue was finding the ancient tome in which the necessary words and sigils were actually inscribed, and if the demon ever managed to reach the elevator (which was always crowded, played only radio commercials and always stopped for at least an hour between floors), navigating the archives was goig to be, fittingly, Hell.

-

Ashtoreth lay draped around Francis's neck like a heavy, sullen scarf. It was he who had suggested it, to avoid confrontation with the cat, and she had seemed enthusiastic enough about idea, allthough Francis had suspected that was because she, currently being cold blooded, enjoy resting against warm skin inside of his woolly jumper. She was not too impressed, however, with the progress of his research. That was fine, neither was he. It was becoming increasingly clear that none of his books had any solutions to how not to be a snake, although he had discovered that one of the bookshelves in his bedroom had something like twenty different books on herpetology, which was boh strange and useful.

He had one of them open on the table next to him now, along with a book that seemed to contain only handwritten incantations in Aramaic, which he did not understand why he owned. He couldn't explain, either, how he recognised the language as such, but it felt right. With his tiny reading glasses perched on his nose, he looked carefully through the unintelligible pages.

"Oh look," he said to Ashtoreth, who was resting her small head in the hollow of his throat, which kept making his heart flutter every time he noticed it, "this one looks like you."

He pointed to a fourteenth century woodcut of a snake which did in fact bear some resemblance to Ashtoreth's sleek black and red elegance, although the artist had, for unknown reasons, given it several pairs of what looked to be the legs of human toddlers. Odd. Ashtoreth rose and leaned down to look, then hissed at him.

It had been only a few hours, but he was already almost getting used to talking to the snake version of Ashtoreth. Used to the feel of her scales against his skin, the way she flexed and used him for leverage as she lay there coiled around him. It felt almost familiar in a strange way, although he was reasonably sure that he had never owned a pet snake. Then again, most of his life felt like a mystery now.

There was a knock on the door. Francis frowned.

"Hello?"

The voice faintly heard through the door belonged to Warlock. Ah. Francis checked his pocket watch. Four in the afternoon.

There was another knock.

"Brother Francis?" Came the little voice again, full of determination.

"Oh- oh dear. All right," he said to himself, and went to open the door, relieved that he no longer had wings. 

Ashtoreth rested beneath his jumper, and he tugged the collar up high so it would cover her.

"Hello, young Master Warlock," Francis said with a smile as he threw open the door, "what can I do for you on this fine afternoon?"

Warlock cast a tiny scowl at the bodyguard who stood a few feet behind him, tall and imposing with a bored look on her face.

"Nanny's gone," he said with a pout.

"Is she, now?"

"Yes," Warlock confirmed, "and Miss Jones is looking after me but she's no fun at all," he told Francis, and stuck his tongue out at her.

She, to her credit, did not react.

"Oh, well, if you and Miss Jones want a little break from each other I'm sure you can stay with me for a little bit?" He offered, looking at them each in turn.

Inside his jumper Ashtoreth poked him with her tail, reminding him that this was, perhaps, not a very good idea.

"Orders are to keep him in sight at all times," Miss Jones said, with a look on her face that said she would, otherwise, have loved a break.

Warlock scowled at her with all the malice his five year old face could muster. 

"You can wait outside, then," Warlock announced, pointing at a bench which had dried after the morning rain.

Miss Jones looked resigned, but shrugged, settling down and taking out her phone. Warlock smiled in triumph, shrugging past Francis and into the cottage.

"Do you have more of those biscuits? With jam?" Warlock inquired, crouching down in front of Oscat and staring into his greenish eyes.

"Err, yes, I believe so," Francis replied distractedly, "would you like some tea or cocoa as well? Or some milk? Children enjoy milk, yes?"

"Cocoa," Warlock said, with all the politeness of an adult seconds from demanding to see the manager.

He gently headbutted Oscat, and pouted when this made the cat flee to the relative safety of beneath the sofa, rather than appreciate his attempt to return the communication of affection graciously translated into cat terms.

When he received his small plate of biscuits and cup of cocoa, and Francis had settled in the lumpy armchair which was usually reserved for less favoured visitors, Warlock stuffed an entire biscuit in his mouth, and asked Francis why he had a snake around his neck.

"Ah," said Francis, "Well."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The logic, which they in the text obviously do not realise, and so it's hard to include it, behind their shapes shifting while they sleep, is that in Good Omens their magic seems to be largely semi conscious. They expect something to happen and it just sort of does, right? So with their memories gone, thinking they're human, they expect that the universe will treat them as it does most humans, and so things stay pretty mundane. But when they're asleep there's just the subconscious, the muscle memory, if you will, of neurons. Which, being neurons, obviously don't have muscles, just branches. But you know. The magic of habit, sort of? Responding to dreams which the memory ritual does not affect. Also the ritual is clearly a bit shoddy. But look, I got a b on my exam essay on lesion damage's effects on memory for my cognitive psychology course okay, and a satanic ritual can count as a lesion damage if I want and just... Just don't question it too hard guys.  
> Also i wrote this one my phone at work and my notes app makes it hard to edit so. Sorry.


	9. lvl 5 warlock

“Why have you got a snake around your neck?” Warlock asked, as casually as only a young child could.

“Ah,” said Francis, “well.”

“That’s not an answer,” Warlock helpfully informed him. 

“It is not,” he agreed.

“I think she likes it around my neck because it’s nice and warm,” he added, settling on something that was technically an answer, and which the young boy might accept.

“Oh,” Warlock said, “cool. Can I touch it?”

“She’s a she, not an it, dear boy. But we can try to ask, yes? You remember I’ve told you about letting the animal decide whether it’s okay to pet it?”

“You have,” Warlock admitted, “but the cat never asks before it gets on my lap.”

“Well, yes, he’s a bit rude like that,” Francis agreed, “but you’re smarter than the cat, aren’t you?”

“I am,” Warlock agreed.

“I can count to twenty and the cat didn’t even get to one.”

“Yes, there you see. You’ve got to take the responsibility because you’re the smarter one. Not everyone and every thing is as capable as you. So you’ve got to be better.”

“All right, fine, but can I ask the snake if I can pet it?”

Francis sighed, fairly certain the boy had absorbed none of the points he had brought up, but lifted his hand up to let Ashtoreth coil around it. She looked at him for a moment, but her face was, naturally, entirely unreadable. 

“Is it all right, Sister Snake, if the young boy tries to pet you? He does promise to be nice.”

She gave the tiniest, most imperceptible nod. Wouldn’t do for Warlock to get suspicious. Francis reached out his hand, and let Ashtoreth stretch out a little towards the boy.

“Remember,” Francis said, “careful soft touches. They’re delicate little ones, snakes, and don’t take so kindly to the rougher treatment.”

“Yeah,” Warlock said, but with the impatience of a youth just about to touch something weird and slightly scary.

He reached his stubby little fingers out, hovering carefully just a few inches from Ashtoreth’s snout. 

“Promise she won’t bite?”

“You know I can’t promise that. Animals will act as is natural to them, but I don’t think she is likely to, no. She’s quite tame, this girl. Been sleeping round my neck all morning.”

Slowly, deliberately, Warlock touched Ashtoreth’s head with the very tip of a finger. He let it rest there for a few moments, and, when it became clear that nothing bad was going to happen, he stroked carefully along the scales on her head and neck. She didn’t react at all, other than to look up at him a little.

“Feels nice,” Warlock announced.

“I thought they were supposed to be slimy.”

“No, that’s more amphibians, I believe. Or at the very least, not reptiles. Certainly not snakes. No, she’s very nice and smooth, isn’t she?”

The boy nodded, watching in fascination as Ashtoreth unwound herself, slithering down Francis’s arm until she doubled up on herself around his wrist, like an incredibly dense and heavy bracelet, the frontmost third of her reaching out towards Warlock.

“Why have you got a snake, then?”

This was a difficult question.

“I’m, ah, watching her. For a friend. They needed a, well, a snake sitter, I suppose.”

“Didn’t know you had friends that weren’t nanny,” Warlock said with the casualty and unintended cruelty of youth.

“I, ah- I do,” he insisted, though not, perhaps, terribly convincingly.

“What are they called, then?” 

Francis frowned, trying hard to think of a name, to think of any friends he truly remembered, that weren’t part of the staff here. It was significantly more difficult than he was comfortable with. He must have other friends, surely? Whom yes, perhaps he hadn’t seen since he started here, but that was what getting older was like, wasn’t it? You drifted apart a little, lives going in different directions, but you didn’t simply stop being friends with people for that reason, did you? Still, he couldn’t think of anything until suddenly a name solidified in his brain.

“Crowley,” he said, with a hint of triumph.

He realised, a tad too late, that Crowley was, in fact, Ashtoreth’s last name. Ah. Warlock, however, either didn’t know or didn’t remember this, and seemed to accept it.

“How long have you got the snake for, then?”

“Ah, well, you see, I’m not entirely sure. A little while. My friend said he would come and pick her up again when he was finished with business, but didn’t specify when that might be.”

“Hmm,” said Warlock.

“What’s her name?

“Uh,” said Francis.

“Ash?” he suggested, “because she’s dark, see, like ashes.”

“Ash is grey,” Warlock, sensibly, argued.

“Well, yes, but my friend is colour blind, you see.”

“Oh. Okay.”

Warlock seemed, thankfully, to accept this, despite the fact that it did not, in any way, make sense. Francis almost dreaded the boy getting older, no longer being satisfied with such simple and improvised answers.

“Where’s nanny?” Warlock asked, sitting back down and focusing on the now half empty mug of cocoa.

“Well, she’s ill.”

“I know, but she wasn’t in her room. I looked.”

“I, ah, I haven’t heard from her today, but perhaps she had to go to the doctor? She could be that kind of ill.”

“It’s not fair,” announced Warlock, “that she’s gone and I have to play with Miss Jones. She’s no fun at all and she gave me the wrong juice. She cut my apple in the wrong shape. I don’t like her.”

“No, it’s not. I’m sure nanny will come back as soon as she’s feeling better, and I’m sure she misses you too. And, you know, Miss Jones is trying her best, I’m sure she just doesn’t quite know how to do nanny’s job properly.”

Warlock seemed unconvinced, but drank some more cocoa rather than argue further. Ashtoreth curled back around on herself, slithering back down into the warmth and comfort of Francis’s jumper, her scales having cooled just enough to make Francis terribly aware of her every movement.

“One of the guards said nanny had gone here to fuck you,” Warlock said, munching on the last crumbs of the remaining biscuit.

Francis’s eyes widened. 

“What does that mean? Nanny says fuck sometimes but she won’t tell me what it means.”

“And she’s right not to,” Francis said with slightly more force than was perhaps necessary.

Ashtoreth fuck him. Well. It was good to know he wasn’t the only one who thought about that, he supposed, though it seemed awfully crude, gossiping like that.

“That’s not fair,” Warlock said, “nanny says people shouldn’t be punished for asking questions. Says that only leads to bad things.”

Ashtoreth tightened slightly around Francis’s neck.

“All right, then,” Francis said, steeling himself, “it is something that two adults sometimes do with each other when they love each other very much. It’s a bit… It’s like kissing. But that word is a very rude way to say it.”

“Oh,” said Warlock, seeming satisfied with this.

“Does that mean you love nanny?”

Francis felt his face heating up uncomfortably, though it was somewhat disguised by his habitual sunburn.

“Err, yes, I love her as my dear friend,” he said, stuttering only a little, and feeling her twitch around his neck, the soft barely there flutter of a forked tongue against his skin. 

They would, he thought, have to discuss this when, hopefully, Ashtoreth was again capable of speech. 

“Okay,” said Warlock, who didn’t seem to care much about the answer, watching with interest as the cat attempted to catch a fly on the other side of the room.

“Do you have any video games?” he asked.

“No, Master Warlock, I still don’t. You asked me only last week, you know.”

“Lame,” the boy announced, “I’ll go back to the house and play Call of Duty.”

“Oh,” said Francis, “the call of duty? That sounds very responsible and good. You take Miss Jones with you, perhaps she can assist you in fulfilling your duties.”

The boy squinted at him as if to argue, but then concluded that there might not be a point, and got up to leave, stopping only to slightly too aggressively pat the cat’s head on his way out. Francis breathed a sigh of relief, going over to the window and watching the two leave and head up towards the main house. Ashtoreth’s small head was resting in the hollow of his throat. He was almost glad she couldn’t speak right now, that she couldn’t make fun of him. But no, that was awful to think, wasn’t it? It was. This must be horrifying for her. He had been panicking just about growing some wings, and here she was, transformed completely into something that wasn’t even a mammal. Well. At least she was a vertebrate. He had trouble, on occasion, trusting beings without the good sense to grow some sort of skeletal structure involving a spine.

“Are you all right?” he asked, “the lad wasn’t too rough with you, was he my dear?”

She unwound herself, rising up high enough to look him in the eye and then nodded, and shook her head.

“Yes and no in that order?”

She nodded.

“It’s got to be scary, this, hasn’t it?” he said, mostly to himself, but she nodded anyway.

“I’m sorry I can’t find any way to help you, dear girl, but though my library appears to veer more towards the occult – and herpetology – than I remembered, I still don’t have anything on this. It may be best, in fact, if we just try, as you say, to treat ourselves as computers. To, what did you say, turn ourselves off and then back on again.”

Ashtoreth hissed, but then leaned in, bumping her head against his cheek. She was, he thought, quite affectionate like this. But then, she had been the one to take the initiative otherwise previously too. She had been the one wanting to nap together, the one to kiss his cheek that time. Perhaps she too loved him in some way, was, for some unfathomable reason attracted to him. She had spent some time kissing, and she had laid earlier curled into him, pressing her body against his. Still, it seemed far too good to be true. It wasn’t that he didn’t like himself, nor that he thought himself particularly unattractive nor deserving of love, it was just that it seemed far too good to be true for one like her, for someone he so loved, to love him back, to even see it as a possibility. 

He knew, of course, that he wasn’t, perhaps, the pinnacle of physical attractiveness, but he thought he was easy enough to like still. But oh, Ashtoreth was something special. So elegant, so fierce, and so fiercely good, even if she bristled at the implication of any hint of niceness. She seemed to aspire to some ideal of being strict, but to him, she never managed it. He saw her spoil the child, saw her choose to take all her aggression out only on the roses when they failed to reach her lofty expectations. No, she might not exactly be nice, but she was definitely good.

“How are you feeling, should we try to fix it by napping again?”

She seemed to consider it, her head bobbing back and forth a little before committing to a nod. So he cleaned up after Warlock, and carried his small and scaly friend upstairs. Ashtoreth wasn’t a particularly small snake, she was perhaps around four feet long, enough to wind comfortably around his neck twice, while still loose. She felt solid, a noticeable weight, and, if he were entirely honest, a sort of comfort. 

He laid down on the bed again, this time on his back, draping her into a loose spiral on top of his chest. She looked at him for a moment, and he could almost feel her judging him, before she slithered to the same spot, but underneath his jumper. It was hard, still, not to feel a little bit self conscious about it, but he supposed that his skin was warmer and more comfortable for her in these reptilian circumstances. He thought too, about how uncannily like herself she was in this form. The black and red colour scheme, the way her eyes were just the same, yellow golden, and the way she could, just by the way she looked at him and moved, even without limbs or facility for facial expressions, still communicate so clearly. 

Francis stroked the smooth scales of her head before she draped a section of herself over her own face, the closest she came to closing her eyes like this.

“Let’s hope you wake up human again.”


	10. Being Human

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In the cottage things are looking up, in Hell it's going about as badly as one would expect.

Ashtoreth awoke, suddenly and violently. She was human again, which was a relief, and she lay still for a moment, checking to see if she could move and feel everything, that she had limbs and eyelids and teeth that weren't fangs. Opening her eyes revealed darkness, but not more so than that she saw she was laying half on top of Francis, one of her arms stuck under his jumper. He seemed quite aware of this.

"Sorry," she told him, her voice a whisper as fit the night, as if she might disturb someone, and crawled off him.

Ashtoreth became, suddenly and painfully, aware that she wasn't wearing any clothes. Francis, it seemed, also noticed, because he flung a hand across his eyes, scrambling blindly for a blanket to give her. She grabbed it gratefully, covering herself up, and settling on her side, facing him.

"Thank you. For... for helping me," she told him, looking up at the way a sliver of moonlight outlined the contour of his face.

"Oh," he said, his voice a little strained, "it's no trouble at all. We are, after all, in whatever this is together."

She put a hand on his arm, stroking fingers over scratchy wool, rougher on sensitive skin than hardened scales. Moved her hand up to scratchy muttonchops, to warm skin. He twitched under her touch, and she moved back, giving him space. 

"Is everything all right?"

"Yes," he said, his voice just a little higher pitched.

She frowned, then pushed herself up onto her elbows, looking at him. He seemed distinctly uncomfortable, turning over on his side, his back against her. She rested a hand along his side.

"It's fine," she told him, leaning over to press a kiss to his cheek.

"It's just... just you, there, suddenly. All.. all on top of me. Not, ah, to put the blame on you of course. My fault entirely."

She hid a hint of a laugh at how apologetic and distraught he seemed. It was, if anything, flattering, his getting... getting aroused just because of her presence. Pressing a hand to his shoulder she leaned over enough to kiss him, satisfied at the soft moan this elicited. 

"It's all right," she promised, "really. Flattered, if anything, my dear."

He buried his face back into the pillow with a groan, and she took the opportunity to kiss his neck. He curled up, all defensive, but didn't shift away when she curled around him, pressing into his back, and hand around him.

"Sorry," she murmured, "didn't mean to make you uncomfortable."

"No," he said, "it's all right, it's my... my fault. Just..."

"Nonsense," she said, her hand sliding down to rest on his hip.

"I hope you know, it's... I-" she faltered and bit her lip, wondering how to continue.

"I, ah, feel the same way about you, I suppose," she finished, suddenly glad he wasn't facing her after all.

He was quiet for a long moment, then twisted around to face her. His expression was hard to read in the dark, but it was less happy then she would have hoped.

"Why?" He asked, and there was something helpless in his voice.

"Why? Because I... Because you're so important to me, Francis. You're my closest friend. You're so kind, and lovely, and absolutely rubbish at gardening. Because you're the only one who seems happy to see me, because you are, clearly, as whatever power is turning our lives upside down agrees with, an angel."

There was a hint of a smile on his face, now, thought it was sad.

"It's true, you know."

"What is?"

"What I told the boy."

"That you don't have video games?"

"No. Well, yes, but. But I do love you."

She wanted to kiss him, but she suspected it wouldn’t help at this very moment. Something wasn’t quite right, and she wasn’t entirely sure of what or why.

“As a friend?” she asked, because she didn’t quite dare believe it meant what she wanted it to mean, however clearly he was attracted to her.

“Yes,” he said, and, when her face must have visibly fallen, he hastened to add “but my dear girl, I am also very much _in_ love with you.”

“Then what,” Ashtoreth asked, propping herself up onto her elbows, not managing to care that the sheet slid down to her waist, “is the problem?”

-

Deep in the archives of Hell, a demon struggled. They sat in front of a desk piled high with ancient and just slightly mouldy tomes. They were definitely tomes and not books; thick stacks of paper bound in what was very clearly leather made from human skin, some of them going so far as to subtly seep blood. The librarian, who was a particularly large and disagreeable demon, wielded a battle axe which hissed gently, as if covered in acid that tried and failed to devour it, ready to burn off the skin of anyone foolish enough to get hit by it. 

The lights flickered on and off; the single source of illumination an ancient and lonely lightbulb. It was hard to read, but yes, this seemed to be the right tome, the right ritual to fix their own stupid mistake. The rat, having moved off of their head sat and licked at the blood leaking from one of the books, and seemed quite satisfied. There came a low, threatening growl from the librarian, who seemed to communicate not so much through words as noises quite like that made by a garbage disposal. They were close to using up their time. Quickly, sloppily, they scrawled down the requisite sigils and components, making a mental note to double check the pronunciation with someone. With the components ready, they put the tome back, giving the librarian a deeply uncomfortable smile.

-

“Look,” Francis said, “the thing is…”

He was laying on his back, now, a sheet covering him, though by now it was no longer needed for the sake of decency. Ashtoreth rested on her side, sheet now pulled up to cover her breasts because it seemed to distract Francis, which, to be honest, she thought was quite fun.

“It wouldn’t be appropriate,” he concluded.

“Why not?” she demanded.

“Because we’re co-workers. What would they say?”

Ashtoreth sighed.

“They already are, Francis. Do you not remember your conversation with Warlock earlier?”

“Yes, but that’s gossip. No truth to it. We can’t get fired over that.”

“You think the Dowlings care? Or, to be frank, even notice us enough to do so?”

“They might,” Francis replied, somewhat defensively.

“And,” he said, wielding the newfound argument like a conveniently picked up sword after your own had been broken, “and what would Warlock think, hmm?”

“He’s five,” Ashtoreth pointed out, “he doesn’t care.”

She sighed, and rolled over onto her back, looking up at the ceiling. Oscat Wilde, sensing this rare opportunity, immediately leapt up onto the bed and started kneading her ribs with all of his considerable weight and sharp claws behind it. 

“These are just excuses,” she told him when he failed to come up with a plausible defence.

“What is the worst that can happen? What are you really afraid of?”

He turned his face, at last, too look at her, his eyes dark.

“You, I think.”

“Why?” she demanded, a little more edge to her voice than she had intended.

He looked at her confused, as it this ought to be self evident, when really it made no sense at all.

“Because you’re too good for me. Because while I do not doubt what you say you feel, I do suspect it’s because you are here, surrounded by all these, these… _Americans_ , all these people with whom you have nothing in common, with whom you aren’t even friends. And you never take your days off, do you, you’re simply always here, so, of course, how are you to meet anyone? And me? I suppose I’m… what did you say? Kind? There?”

“That’s unfair of you,” she said, “to the both of us. You know as well as I do that it’s not- It isn’t easy. I’m… Look. You may be right that the situation is why I fell for you, but that doesn’t change my feelings, doesn’t make them less real.”

“I know, I’m not saying you don’t… You don’t know what you feel, just that I worry that whenever this ends, you will realise what you’re missing out on. You’ll move somewhere else and there will be more options and I think that would break my heart, dear.”

She held back a groan.

“I understand that it’s scary, but you can’t just refuse to enter a relationship on the grounds it might end some day, Francis. Everything ends, eventually.”

“I absolutely can,” Francis argued, his face perilously close to a childish pout.

Ashtoreth did groan, then.

“You’re getting close to making me change my mind,” she told him, wincing as one of the cat’s claws pierced her skin particularly deeply.

She nudged the offending feline gently to the side, offering it a pillow to abuse instead, and turned to face Francis again. Outside the first hint of dawn was creeping into the sky.

“Look, Francis. I- I love you. I love you, and I would like to be with you, but I can’t promise you that that will last forever, that I will never fall out of love, that’s not how people work. You don’t just have one person you meet on your first day on this Earth and then never want anyone else ever again. But I wish you would try, that we could try. Together.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I swear my intention was to have them bang in this chapter but clearly that was not where this went. I think I might actually finish this fic, write out a neat little ending, in another few chapters. Which will make it my first finished chapter fic. Keep your fingers crossed for me finishing a project for the first time ever.


End file.
